Masters Profile: Priscilla Welch

Bird set free

Welch's only coach for her entire career was her husband, who unexpectedly passed away during a bike tour of Switzerland in late 2006. "We were a great team," she recalls. "Dave knew a lot about training, and he was quick to realize what worked for me and what didn't, and quickly prune down the schedule." Most of that training was effort-based, using the principles Dave had gleaned from Training Distance Runners by Peter Coe and Dr. Dave Martin.

"You need to teach the body to burn fat and carbohydrate at the same time," says Welch, and to that end, she ran lots of "long slow miles." She was also an early advocate of altitude training; prior to the '84 Olympics, she and Dave set up a training base in Boulder, and lived there for 17 years afterward.

Asked to pick one key workout most responsible for her success, Welch singled out a session of long repeats, usually kilometers but sometimes 800s or 600s if she was particularly tired. "I'd do 3 sets of 5, at 85 percent of max heart rate, with just a 200 recovery after each rep," she recalls. "That was a pretty good indicator of what my current marathon pace would be."

Although Welch once joked that her husband was "a slave driver, and I was a willing participant," more truthful was her assessment that running made her feel "like a bird let out of a cage – I loved it that much."